Content-Sensitive Characterization of Peer Interactions of Highly Engaged Users in an Online Community for Smoking Cessation: Mixed-Methods Approach for Modeling User Engagement in Health Promotion Interventions.

Background: Online communities provide affordable venues for behavior change. However, active user engagement holds the key to the success of these platforms. In order to enhance user engagement and in turn, health outcomes, it is essential to offer targeted interventional and informational support.

Objective: In this paper, we describe a content plus frequency framework to enable the characterization of highly engaged users in online communities and study theoretical techniques employed by these users through analysis of exchanged communication.

Methods: We applied the proposed methodology for analysis of peer interactions within QuitNet, an online community for smoking cessation. Firstly, we identified 144 highly engaged users based on communication frequency within QuitNet over a period of 16 years. Secondly, we used the taxonomy of behavior change techniques, text analysis methods from distributional semantics, machine learning, and sentiment analysis to assign theory-driven labels to content. Finally, we extracted content-specific insights from peer interactions (n=159,483 messages) among highly engaged QuitNet users.

Results: Studying user engagement using our proposed framework led to the definition of 3 user categories-conversation initiators, conversation attractors, and frequent posters. Specific behavior change techniques employed by top tier users (threshold set at top 3) within these 3 user groups were found to be goal setting, social support, rewards and threat, and comparison of outcomes. Engagement-specific trends within sentiment manifestations were also identified.

Conclusions: Use of content-inclusive analytics has offered deep insight into specific behavior change techniques employed by highly engaged users within QuitNet. Implications for personalization and active user engagement are discussed.